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Hello all, Today I come to you with this question as I have been frustrated after reflecting on my past experiences in marketing roles here. Before starting this conversation, I want to clarify what marketing is. It’s not just posting on social media, making posters or selling products/services directly to consumers. It is in fact understanding the market, along with its consumers, competition, and overall business environment. Through this information we get to create strategies which position businesses, and assist in bettering communication to attract customers. It paves way for sustainable growth. The biggest problem I have encountered is that many companies that are hiring often confuse marketing with other creative roles such as sales, graphic designers, photographers or videographers. It’s all grouped into one role and you are essentially doing 5 people’s job under 1 small pay check. It’s not right. For instance marketing strategist focuses on branding, positioning, and planning of campaigns, market researchers conduct studies in customer behaviors, competitor behaviors, and product trends and content creators focus on messaging and script writing. All of these including the previous roles I mentioned such as graphic designer and videographers are all different roles connected to marketing BUT ARE NOT THE SAME JOB. In other countries this is split into different roles/positions but here most of the time it’s not. Even in the biggest companies it has been like that which was very disappointing to find out. I do understand how smaller companies benefit from hiring all rounders but it just doesn’t change the fact that there is a serious difference in assisting with multiple tasks than solely being responsible for it: and that too without getting the proper pay, support or recognition. Another thing I want to highlight specifically is how there are no market researcher roles, it’s always very creative and social media driven. Majority of the people in Maldives are unaware on how to conduct market research. This is crazy to me because that means we have a lot of untapped markets here. Market research reveals so much. It helps us understand what consumers actually want, what gaps exist in the market, what segments are worth targeting, how competitors perform and even identify best pricing strategies. Without this, many businesses are just playing a guessing game. This leads to much resource wastage and lost money. If we have this data available it would be such a great impact on SMEs, because most of the time SMEs struggle to reach the successful 5 year mark due to not having access to data on market trends I am happy marketing allows so much space for creativity but I think because of this huge focus on the creative side, the analytical side gets washed away. I have been looking for analytical roles ever since I graduated but I couldn’t find any. It’s always content related or design. I genuinely wish for there to be a community or idk how to say it exactly…like professional local groups or sumn raajje ga where people in our field (business, marketing, research design and media) can have open conversations about these things cos it seriously can’t just be me who only feels like this. But at the same time…I’m honestly scared whether people would even be willing to listen. Even during the time I was studying, people were super adamant to hearing me out until after we got done with the degree. Many of us were struggling to find good paying jobs. And how it ended? It was sad. I know so many of my collleagues who graduated and they decided to not pursue marketing anymore because of the shit job market for marketing. It is 1) drastically different from what we were taught, 2) excruciatingly demanding and 3) of course unrewarding. (Not to mention that starter pay with degree SUCKS but then again that’s like that for all jobs here. FML for not being a nepo—- UGHH) Anyways I hope yall know im not tryna attack the field or acting like I know everything. I am still learning so I acknowledge I could be wrong about any of this. The reason why I decided to write this down is because I thought opening a conversation could get something started. Even if it’s a small change. I think it’s always better to try bring awareness to these things because who knows, starting small changes maybe can lead to something bigger. So, what do you think? Any people in marketing here? 🤭🫣
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